Who Made That Weather Icon?

As a design student at the Norwich School of Art in the early 1970s, Mark Allen watched the weather broadcast every afternoon on the BBC. Back then, TV presenters slid magnetic symbols around a metal map: dots for rain, asterisks for snow, lines to mark off areas of equal pressure. “They were just hieroglyphics as far as everybody was concerned,” Allen says. “Why was a triangle a rain shower?”

For his final project in 1974, Allen set out to make weather icons more intuitive. He looked to a set of pictograms by Otl Aicher, who devised spare, thick-lined figures for the 1972 Olympic Games. Allen used a similar style to trace a puffy cloud, adding simple icons to the bottom edge: rain droplets, lightning bolts, rays of sun. “The main vehicle was the cloud, and I hung everything off that,” he says. The BBC adopted Allen’s iconography in 1975, in exchange for 200 pounds and a small percentage of license fees. His drawings stayed on the air for 30 years.

They were neither the first nor the last weather icons, but they were perhaps the most elegant. For decades, weather maps had been cluttered with technical notation. The first commercial weather map, sent out by the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1910, represented cloud conditions with empty and filled circles and the wind with tiny arrows. By 1912, these maps were reproduced in more than 100 cities. The symbols grew less obscure, says Mark Monmonier, a historian and geographer at Syracuse University, when competition among wire services, which started sending out weather maps in the ’30s, led to simpler, more attractive designs.

Weathermen often drew their maps as cameras rolled, using wax pencils or felt-tip markers, until the 1970s, when, as Allen’s weather icons were adopted at the BBC, U.S. stations tried their own stick-on, magnetic symbols. The advent of computer graphics in the 1980s brought more standardized, low-res icons: “You only had 16 colors that you could put on the graphic,” says Mike Nelson, a Denver meteorologist who worked for a company called ColorGraphics Weather Systems. “You couldn’t be all that creative.”

By the late 1980s, computer systems were advanced enough that stations could select their own custom-made graphics. And when weather forecasts made their way to websites and mobile apps, things became even more customized. Around 2000, a government meteorologist in Texas named Dennis Cain made a set of icons from photographs — rainy streets, wind turbines, headlights in the fog — which became the standard images on weather.gov.

Like other weather icons, Cain’s have fierce adherents. When the National Weather Service said it might swap the photo icons for more conventional figures, it received 18,000 comments in the first few days — most angry. The BBC faced similar outrage when it retired Allen’s icons in 2005. Weather symbols “can get very controversial very quickly,” says Robert Bunge, who was the director of Internet services for the National Weather Service at the time. “You can get buried in it.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014, on Page MM24 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Who Made That? (Weather Icon). Today's Paper|Subscribe